Thursday, September 26, 2013

Old case turns tables on advocates for the wrongly accused

Over and over, I and others who take up the cause of those who may have been wrongfully convicted ask the same questions of professionals in the criminal justice system:

Are you sure about this one? Have you kept an open mind to the idea that you might have been wrong?

Because over and over, we've seen them downplay or disregard altogether troubling elements known to infect prosecutions.

Witnesses who can't keep their stories straight. Confessions obtained under duress or false pretenses. New evidence or evidence not considered at trial that points toward reasonable doubt. Plausible alternate suspects.

You're only human, we remind them. And people make mistakes.

Well, for many years a small group of advocates has been urging us — journalists who cover controversial cases as well as the activists and lawyers who fight for the wrongfully convicted — to turn those questions back on ourselves in the case of Alstory Simon (right)

The witnesses against him in a 1982 double murder have recanted. His confession was obtained under duress and false pretenses. He never had a trial. And witnesses have identified a plausible alternate suspect.

One. The plausible alternate suspect in the case is Anthony Porter, which is awkward, to say the least. His name may ring a bell. He was sentenced to die for the double murder and was just two days from his execution date in 1998 when he won a reprieve based on his low IQ.

Several months later, a private investigator working with a Northwestern University professor and a crew of student sleuths obtained a videotaped confession from Simon. This led to Porter's quick, dramatic release from prison and shattered then-Gov. George Ryan's confidence in the death penalty.

There's a straight line between Ryan's moral indignation over the Porter case to the abolition of capital punishment in Illinois in 2011. And if Simon isn't actually guilty, a key portion of the cherished narrative retrospectively begins to unravel.

But if we're not willing to unravel our cherished narratives, we're wearing the same blinders we accuse police and prosecutors of wearing.

Two. Simon's main champions seem more interested in playing gotcha than serving justice. His attorneys are best known for defending police and prosecutors against charges of wrongdoing, not volunteering their time to aid those who claim to have been victims of the courts.

When they along with a police officer who's writing a book on the case and a dyspeptic former investigative reporter advance Simon's claim, it smells of payback and opportunism.

But to hold that against Simon is to engage in guilt by association or atmospherics, something we generally and rightly deplore.

Three. Simon's story is very hard to believe. He says he confessed on that fateful morning because he felt trapped and frightened by the private investigators who stormed into his home and lied to him about the evidence, and that he pleaded guilty and otherwise kept up the act because he believed it was part of a plan to get him a two-year prison sentence and a big book and movie deal.

Who does that? Why would anyone keep up such a dangerous charade for so long?

But that's merely a variation on the question we've addressed many times in covering case after case of false confession. Suspects, often not the brightest people in the world, say what they think they need to say in order to minimize what they've been told is overwhelming evidence against them.

Simon's volunteer lawyer got Simon a pretty good deal in exchange for his guilty plea — he's scheduled to be paroled in August 2017, about 18-1/2 years after he was taken into custody for the murders for which Porter had been sentenced to death.

But Simon's new advocates note that the volunteer lawyer was allied with the team that had been working to free Porter, and they argue, correctly in my view, that this created an inherent conflict of interest, no matter how well or objectively the lawyer handled the case.

Simon was refusing to release his former lawyer from the bounds of attorney-client privilege when I last wrote about the case in 2006. But I learned last week from a documentary filmmaker pursuing the story that Simon has since signed such a waiver, so I decided to revisit the matter, even though the lawyer still declines to talk about his conversations with Simon.

Having failed to win a full re-examination of Simon's case at the circuit, appellate and state supreme courts, Simon's attorneys are considering an appeal to the Conviction Integrity Unit, formed last year by Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez.

Such a review might end up to be embarrassing for a lot of people, including me. But I'd rather be embarrassed than have an innocent man spend four more years in prison because I joined the ranks of those afraid to ask myself the tough questions.

----

BACKGROUND:

In 2006, David Protess, then of Northwestern University, and private investigator Paul Ciolino responded to Simon's claims of innocence:

Protess:

One of the hallmarks of a false confession is that the defendant
invariably recants the first opportunity he gets. That did not happen
with Alstory Simon.

After confessing to Ciolino, Simon repeated his admissions to
prosecutors, ultimately agreeing to plead guilty and serve a 37-year
sentence. Simon next admitted his guilt to a judge, who asked him a
series of probing questions to determine whether his plea was made of
his own free will and that he understood the consequences. Simon
responded in the affirmative.

But Simon went even further. Never reluctant to express his guilt,
he turned to the mother of one of his victims, and, in open court, twice
apologized for shooting her daughter. (I personally was touched by this
gesture, since it was the victim's mother who first led me to view
Simon as a possible alternative suspect in the Porter case. She'd told
me she last saw her daughter alive when she and her boyfriend left for
Chicago's Washington Park with Simon and his wife, Inez. A short time
later, the murders occurred in the park's bleachers.)

After the judge dispatched Simon to the penitentiary, his actions
were anything but consistent with those of an innocent man who'd been
wronged by a private investigator and the justice system. In fact, he
declined to file a routine motion to vacate his guilty plea, and
waived his right to directly appeal his conviction and sentence....

I am proud to have played an important role during my career in
freeing ten innocent men, five of whom had been on death row. But I am
no prouder than being able to help exonerate Anthony Porter, a man who
had come within 50 hours of execution.

The release of Porter and the conviction of Alstory Simon produced
sweeping changes in our criminal justice system, and, just as
importantly, brought comfort to the family members of the murder victims
and the wrongly incarcerated.

My hope is that Alstory Simon's latest claim will be dismissed as
summarily as his previous ones, and that the truth will once again
emerge, having been partially obscured by a public relations offensive
orchestrated by attorneys with an agenda. In almost 20 years of
reporting and writing about miscarriages of justice, Simon's case
involves one of the most clear-cut cases of guilt that I have ever seen.

Ciolino:

A notorious violent heroin dealer (Simon) and a prostitute (Jackson)
are the last two seen with Simon's late/non-paying Lieutenant and
girlfriend. Lieutenant and girlfriend wind up dead. Heroin dealer and
girlfriend hustle out of town NEVER to return leaving everything behind.

Eighteen years later Paul Ciolino, David Protess, a bunch of students
cook up the grand conspiracy of all grand conspiracies and frame
Alstory Simon.

Ciolino and Protess manage to bribe and pay off entire Cook County
States Attorney’s office and involve them in grand conspiracy. Chicago
Police department blesses unholy alliance because they to are in on the
big pay off from Hollywood. Ciolino, Protess, students CCSA office, and
CPD convince Jack Rimland that he too will become rich only if he will
help convince a Cook County Judge that he too will be rewarded by
Hollywood.

Now six years later EkL and Sotos and company come to the rescue and
expose the mother of all conspiracies involving about a hundred master
criminals. My only question is when do we see the money from Hollywood?
I’m still waiting.

Oh and let us not forget Eric Zorn’s participation, and the entire
CBS network news department. Maybe they got the money. I don’t know but
I’m sure the boys from DuPage County have it figured out. Then maybe we
can finally get paid.

In closing I just want to say that Jack Rimland and David Protess are
two of the most ethical and honest people that I have ever met or been
associated with. Attacking them and their integrity is criminal and
reckless.

At approximately 6:30 am. on February 3, 1999, two men armed with guns came to my house in Milwaukee. They told me they were"police investigators" from Illinois,and accused me of shooting Jerry Hillard and Marilyn Green.

They told me.that my ex-wife Inez and "other witnesses" had signed statements stating that I had committed the murders. At the time I had been up all night doing cocaine and drinking with my girlfriend Pearl Russ, who was getting ready to leave for work when they arrived.

I told the person who I now know to be Paul Ciolino that he was crazy; that I did not kill anybody,and that he and his partner should leave my house. He told me they were not going anywhere, and that I had better look at the evidence he had.

Ciolino then made me watch a videotape of a black male person stating that he was a witness to the murders and that he actually saw meshoot the two victims. At this point I became angry, repeated that I knew nothing about the murders, told them that the witness in the videotape was a liar, and again told the men to leave my house.

They refused to leave. They showed me a statement from Inez's nephew, Walter Jackson, stating that I toid him on the day of the murders that I killed the victims. I continued to tell the men that I didn't kill anybody, that this was all crazy, and that they should leave right then.

During this whole time, Ciolino kept telling me that they had all the evidence they needed to convict me, that I was going to go down for these murders and end up on death row, and there was nothing I could do about it.

After showing me the videotape and the affidavits, Ciolino said I want you to see something, and they tuned the TV to a station that was doing a story about the murders.

The TV story presented the same professor who had previously come to my house with the girls, saying Anthony Porter was innocent, and the story also included a videotape of Inez saying that she saw me shoot the victims.

Ciolino also showed
me a signed statement where Inez said she saw me shoot Jerry Hillard and Marilyn Green.

After seeing this story on TV,I was no longer just angry. I was scared to death~ For the first time I believed that I was actually going to be charged with committing the murders.

One of the men then turned the TV off and Ciolino said that he was going to level with me.

He said that the men were not "police" investigators", but actually, were "private" investigators who worked for the professor who they had just shown me ontelevision.

He said they had all the evidence they needed to put me on death row, and that the Chicago police were on their way to arrest me right then.

He said that once the police get to my house there would be nothing more he could do for me, and this was my one and only chance to help myself by giving a statement saying that I shot the two victims in self-defense.

Ciolino said that he and the professor wanted to free Anthony Porter, that when he got out, millions of dollars were going to be made on movies and book deals, that I would be entitled
to a lot of the money,and that they were not concerned with hurting me.

He convinced me
that he was actually trying to help me by giving me a way out before the police got to my house to arrest me. He said that if I gave a statement saying I did the crimes in self-defense, that he would get me a free lawyer, that the professor could make it so that I only had to serve a short time in prison, and that when I got out, I'd be taken care of financially, and would not have to work again.

I told Ciolino that this was all crazy,that I did not kill anyone, and that I could not believe they were doing this. At one point, Ciolino put his hand on his gun and said that we could do this the easy way, or we could do it the hard way, but either way, I was going to give a statement. I even attempted to get to the phone to call the
Milwaukee police, at which time the other investigator, who was also armed, stood in front
ofthe phone and blocked me from getting to it.

Ciolino told me that people have accidents ... in their homes all the time , and that we could even have an accident right now . . .
By this time, I was convinced that if l did not say I shot the two victims in self·defense, that they had enough evidence to convict me of murder and that I would end up on death row.

Ciolino asked me if I could read, and when I said that I could, he told me to read what was in the papers he had. He wrote on a pad of paper and said that we would practice my statement until I memorized it well enough to say on videotape.

I then read the affidavits Ciolino gave me, and he told me to just say that I only shot Jerry because I though he was going for a weapon, and that Marilyn getting shot was just an accident because·she just got in the way. Ciolino emphasized to me that it was important for me to say when I shot them that I was in fear for my life and that shooting Marilyn was just an accident.

He said that he would make sure that it was a self defense case.

After we practiced the statement several times,Ciolino had me say the statement on the videotape.

I had the papers he showed men eJd;to me when I was giving the statement so I could remind myself of things if I forgot what he wanted me to say.

At some point, Ciolino made a phone call and told me that attorney Jack Rim1and would be representing me. He assured me that, just as he was doing with Anthony Porter, Professor Protess would be able
to pull the strings necessary to have me released from prison after a short time.....

Sometime after I plead guilty, Rimland sent me a letter advising me that our business was concluded and that he was no longer representing me.

By this time, I had begun to understand that Protess and Ciolino were not going to take steps to have me released from prison, and that I was not going to receive any money.

As a result,I began my own efforts
to secure my freedom by filing a pro-se post-conviction petition. In preparing my pro-se post conviction petition I did not have access to the materials and witnesses necessary to adequately set forth all of the facts and circumstances involved in the denial.of my constitutional rights.

I had no involvement in the murders of Jerry Hillard and Marilyn Green. I only gave the statement to Ciolino because he had convinced me that if I did not say that I killed these people in self-defense I was gong to death row and there was nothing Icould do about it.

He also convinced me that if I did say I killed them in self-defense I would serve just a couple of years in prison and that I would benefit from movie and book deals when Protess got me released.

Many months passed between petitioner’s confession to Paul Ciolino, a private investigator who was not an agent of the State, and his guilty plea. At no time did petitioner claim he was innocent. When petitioner pleaded guilty, he waived all constitutional defects in his case.

It is well settled law that a voluntary guilty plea waives all errors, defects (and) irregularities in proceedings that are not jurisdictional, including constitutional errors….. The Illinois Appellate Court stated petitioner’s recurring issues regarding the alleged involuntariness of his guilty plea and any possible coercion could have been raised in a direct appeal since he was aware of all the relevant facts surrounding the circumstances of the plea. This claim is now barred by res judicata and collateral estoppel....

Petitioner also alleges his wife, Inez Jackson, and her
nephew whose statements implicated him in the double murders have now
recanted. But for their statements, he would not have confessed to the
double murder.

Recantations are inherently unreliable and do not
constitute new material evidence. Recantations are often deemed
unreliable and recantations containing admissions of perjury are highly
unreliable.

He lost again at the Illinois Court of Appeals on March 5, 2008 and was denied a hearing the Illinois Supreme Court on May 29, 2008. He signed a waiver (.pdf) of attorney-client privilege on Sept. 16, 2011.

If Alstory Simon's case is reviewed and he's found not guilty, this doesn't necessarily mean that Anthony Porter was guilty, but I won't have as ringing a defense if someone serves up these words of mine from a Nov. 20, 2005 column and suggests I eat them:

Anthony Porter was innocent.

We know this because the first people to go to the South Side park and re-enact the crime--a group of student sleuths from Northwestern University--proved that the witness who fingered Porter couldn't have seen what he said he did from where he said he was standing.

We know this because the Northwestern team found an alternative suspect, Alstory Simon of Milwaukee, and Simon gave a detailed, 10-minute confession on videotape when private investigator Paul Ciolino went to his house and confronted him with evidence against him.

We know this because Simon's estranged wife signed an affidavit saying she witnessed Simon shoot the victims during a dispute over drug money, just as Simon said to Ciolino.

We know this because Simon pleaded guilty to the murders (though he later tried and failed to have the courts let him withdraw those pleas on the grounds that he was tricked into falsely confessing by the wily Northwestern team).

And we know this because in May 2000, the Illinois Court of Claims awarded Porter $145,875 in restitution for 16 years of "unjust imprisonment."

We know, in short, that Porter's case was a flagrant and frightening miscarriage of justice--one that then-Gov. George Ryan alluded to less than a year after Porter's release when he announced the start of a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois that is still in effect.

"I cannot support a system which, in its administration, has proven so fraught with errors and has come so close to the ultimate nightmare, the state's taking of an innocent life," Ryan said. "How do you prevent another Anthony Porter--another innocent man or woman from paying the ultimate penalty for a crime he or she did not commit?"

I won't be alone. Here's a passage from a June 9, 2000 column:

Dudley Sharp, director of death-penalty resources for the victim's rights group Justice for All, puts the number (of actually innocent Death-Row exonerees in Illinois at one. "'A prosecutorial review of [Illinois' 13] cases has revealed that only . . . Anthony Porter . . . offers a consensus for proof of factual innocence," he wrote recently during our extensive on-line debate.

Comments

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EZ,

You know where my sympathies lie when it comes to criminal appeals, but it's almost impossible for me to imagine a plausible explanation for a months-long gap between a false admission to Ciolino and the guilty plea.

I mean, A LOT of Simon's story doesn't make sense, but that part just doesn't make any sense at all.

-- MrJM

ZORN REPLY -- It's farfetched, but most false-confession cases start with the implausible notion that no one would ever confess to something they didn't do. This guys' not bright, he thinks he has a raft of people willing to turn evidence on him, he says he's told he'll do two years then share in the book and movie money if he just goes along with this plan.
The case called for a totally disinterested defense attorney, someone not well acquainted with those who were being lionized for their work in the case. I didn't see it at the time. I don't think THEY saw it at the time. The courts haven't though it significant, but I think it falls far below the standards we ought to set for ourselves.

1) I understand how the police's use of the Reid technique especially in the confines of in a jailhouse and over an extended period of time can elicit a false confession. But it is still tough for me to see how the weird scenario outlined above elicits a false confession that wouldn't be recanted at some time in the months before the guilty plea.

But on the other hand, I can't understand how a genuine confession elicited under those conditions wouldn't have been recanted either. So I guess I shouldn't hold the bizarre nature of his claim against him, since the prosecution's story is very nearly as bizarre.

2) You are absolutely right that Simon should have been represented by an attorney with absolutely no connection to this case. Every defendant deserves an unalloyed advocate. And Simon definitely didn't get one.

Kudos to having an open mind on this case and putting it in front of the public.

A couple of other points:

1) As EZ mentioned, journalists have a lot invested in Porter being guilty. The Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing on the death penalty and the Porter case was often cited. That probably explains why the Tribune news pages have refused to cover Simon's possible innocence. As a pure news story, it's a blockbuster -- In the name of freeing innocent man, advocates frame innocent man.

2) The Sun-Times did dozens of stories heralding the Porter release. They also are refusing to cover Simon's possible innocence.

3) CBS, both locally and nationally, went far on a limb promoting Porter's innocence, working hand and hand with Northwestern and Protess. They have some explaining to do if they participated in framing Simon.

4) Apart from the confession, there's little or no evidence against Simon. A couple of witnesses have recanted and as I understand there's no evidence Simon was near the scene at the time of the shooting. By contrast, contrary to press reports at the time, there are multiple people who place Porter at the scene at the time of the shooting with a gun. Remember, all this evidence was heard in Porter's civil trial and a Cook County jury gave Porter no award.

5) Northwestern under Protess had a habit of overzealously trying to pin murders on innocent people in the name of freeing others. The Paris, IL case was one example and there are others.

--Perhaps if Eric Zorn had ever bothered to interview Simon or the investigating detectives, he would have seen clearly that Simon's claims of innocence jibed with the facts much better than the wild claims of Protess and Ciolino. But Zorn never did.

He also never interviewed the detectives. Though the detectives were accused of the worst abuses in this case, Zorn, and the rest of the reporters at the Trib, never bothered to get their side of it. Protess, Ciolino and his students are guilty of the same failure.

Though Northwestern based its claims of Porter's innocence on the theory that the detectives framed Porter, the investigators never contacted the detectives to hear their side. That's a stunning fact given that Protess and his students were working on a journalism class. When did journalists or journalism students ever announce police framed someone without ever even trying to hear their side of it?

For six years the detectives lived under the cloud of those accusations. If any of them had talked to the detectives, they would have known within fifteen minutes that Porter was the offender and the claims of Protess and the students were ridiculous. But they didn't.

The reason is that Zorn, Protess and Ciolino were operating under an intense bias and antipathy against Chicago Police Officers.

Consider the fact that the detectives fought desperately to have their investigation reviewed in the civil train in which Porter's attorneys sought millions from the taxpayers. The facts of that trial show clearly that the detectives' investigation was sound.

That trial was in 2005. Zorn had plenty of evidence from that trial alone to see that something terrible had taken place in the Porter case. But rather than review it, Zorn merely condemned the attorney who argued on behalf of the detectives.

Simon is not a stupid man. He is actually quite intelligent. Simon did not keep up the act of being the offender in the case. This is another sign that Zorn has never looked at the case at all. Simon changed his mind several times while awaiting trial. He even once pleaded not guilty. At one point, he tried to get a new lawyer who would plead not guilty.

It's a good thing Zorn is finally writing about this case, but it's important to put this latest column in context. Zorn has been aware of the staggering evidence of Porter's guilt and Simon's innocence for a long time. He has chosen to do little or nothing about it, save vilify the people who were fighting for Alstory and the cops who were so unfairly maligned.

Now that a documentary is being made, a documentary that will likely do a lot more than embarrass him and the rest of the journalists in Chicago who blew this case so badly, Zorn is suddenly taking it up again, under the claim that he is fighting for justice. There are hardly words to describe such hypocrisy and cowardice.

One question looms above this perverse alliance between wrongful conviction zealots and the Chicago media: If they blew the Porter case so badly, how many others did they blow? If Simon is indeed innocent, and he is, how many other cases at Northwestern under Protess were also dirty?

ZORN REPLY -- I took the case up again because I told the lawyers I would if they got Alstory Simon to release Jack Rimland from attorney client privilege, which they would not do back in 2006. They have done so -- which I just learned last week -- and I so I have revisited the case and am urging Alvarez to put it in the Conviction Integrity Unit hopper. Or to deputize an independent special prosecutor to look at it again, given come of the complexities of the relationships involved.
As I've noted before, it was, on its face, a very bad idea for Rimland to serve as Simon's attorney. Even if Simon is completely guilty and Rimland is the most ethical and smartest lawyer in the history of jurisprudence, it doesn't pass the basic test for justice -- everyone deserves an independent advocate free from even the appearance of conflict.
It opens the door a crack to the extraordinary claim that Simon not only confessed on multiple occasions, but that he apologized in open court when pleading guilty many months later (read Protess above) even though he was utterly innocent.
Rimland is now free to talk about all his conversations with Simon and give an account of his representation the compare to Simon's account. And I think those accounts should be heard by a neutral finder of fact to decide if he should be allowed to withdraw his plea and proceed to trial.

I am confident any fair inquiry into the travesty of the Porter case will reveal that my claims are accurate, including my claims about Zorn. I have a section of my upcoming book, Crooked City, devoted to Chicago media coverage of the Porter case. This travesty could never have unfolded without the complicity of the Chicago media.

Eric, you can make any claims you want in your columns about my intentions or Bill Crawfords, but the simple fact is that I spoke to every side of this case, or at least attempted to, whereas you didn't. What does that reveal about a person’s intentions?

Why did you not speak to the detectives? I made contact with them in two phone calls. Why did you not speak to Alstory Simon? Why didn’t you speak to Walter Jones? Rather than look into the case, you vilified anyone who disagreed with the Northwestern theory. Conversely, at the same time as Porter was being sprung from prison, how many times did you speak to Protess and his students? They were frequent, weren’t they?

Consider what you said about Walter Jones in 2005. Here is a guy who came to believe Porter was guilty and courageously stood by the detectives after he listened to their story. He was asked by a reporter after the trial why Porter got no money and Jones said because Porter is the killer. You condemned him and said the city owes Porter an apology for that statement. You suggested a lawsuit against him. You said that the not guilty verdict against the detectives does not mean Porter was guilty. Well, to a large degree, that’s exactly what it meant. That’s exactly what Jones argued in the trial, that Porter was guilty. That’s what Jones believed after looking at all the evidence. And he won. Didn’t this stir your curiosity at all? Didn’t this show you all the way back then that there was something terribly wrong in this case?

You claim that you are operating from a sense of justice and because you finally got this attorney/client release from Simon. You've vilified too many people who tried to bring this scandal to your attention for that to be true. You vilified Sotos when he tried to get in out in the public. You condemned Walter Jones when he argued Porter was guilty and won in court. You ridiculed Bill Crawford, a Pulitizer Prize winning journalist. You could have obtained this release from Simon more than a decade ago. Simon would have written it out for you himself.

Let’s put this case in perspective. We’re talking about a double homicide in Washington Park on the night of the Bud Billiken parade, the same year cops were being gunned downed regularly on the south side. In less than one month of that year, five cops were shot, four fatally. The Chicago Police rushed into the park that night and did everything they could to save Hillard and Green. They rushed Marilyn Green to the hospital and carried Jerry Hillard down the bleachers to a police wagon. They also investigated the case and found the offender named by the witnesses. It was Anthony Porter. It was textbook solid policing that night, from the responding officers to the investigating detectives. Within 24 hours they had gathered six witnesses, two police witnesses who put Porter at the scene or stated they saw him shoot Green and Hillard. They obtained a warrant for Porter’s arrest.

I want to ask you one more thing. How can the police torture a man they never met? I ask you this because the lead detectives who were accused of torturing Porter never met him in the course of their investigation. They had a warrant issued for his arrest, but they never interviewed him. Porter turned himself in several days later. Nevertheless, as the civil trial approached two decades after the murders, Porter suddenly claims he was tortured by the detectives. How is this possible? This is just one of the many incredible absurdities that permeates this case, which never garnered the scrutiny of the media.

Whether or not the county holds a legitimate investigation into the Porter case, the truth is coming out about the Porter travesty. Too many people now know what truly happened.

This argument is very unique, multi dimensional in fact.
I would leave the lawyers out of this because anyone close to jurisprudence knows what a lawyer must claim in the end.
As for Dr. Protess, as I'm aware, he was fired from Northwestern University for lying and destroying evidence related to the wrongful convictions investigations.
Ultimately, Protess did the same thing that he claimed the cops were doing.
Furthermore, I've read several of the Medill's investigations, and many of them hold water. But I have also read many successful cases where it appears that they are lobbying the Illinois Appeals Court, for years on end, for a loop hole, and not for justice. That, to me is not about seeking truth, its about being right-regardless of the truth.
This changes the spectrum against Northwestern University, and its claim's against the cops, Burge, higher education, journalistic truths, and ultimately integrity as a whole.
Eric, you may want to reveal to your readership that Northwestern University Law school, the Medill Journalism School and the number of journalists directly connected to this context, personally set out on a journey to bring down a street cop named Burge, in order to fulfill some personal fantasy that may not have really existed, except in the minds of Protess, and The People's Law Office.

One thing that I don't really grasp about Eric's position is the importance he is attaching to allowing Simon's lawyer to speak out. I'm sure he is going to deny Simon's allegations, which already is assumed.

Even if the attorney produces some notes or other material, it doesn't prove anything. Nobody will have any idea when the notes were produced or whether they are authentic.

Remember, the attorney we are talking about here was representing Simon in this case WHILE he gave Protess, Ciolino and Northwestern students AN AWARD for uncovering new information that PUT HIS CLIENT IN PRISON.

This is not entirely a he said/he said case. As I recall, there already is at least one affidavit from a pastor in Milwaukee who verifies Simon's version of events via conversations with him at the time.

About "Change of Subject."

"Change of Subject" by Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist Eric Zorn contains observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades, though not necessarily in that order. Links will tend to expire, so seize the day. For an archive of Zorn's latest Tribune columns click here. An explanation of the title of this blog is here. If you have other questions, suggestions or comments, send e-mail to ericzorn at gmail.com.
More about Eric Zorn

Contributing editor Jessica Reynolds is a 2012 graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is the coordinator of the Tribune's editorial board. She can be reached at jreynolds at tribune.com.